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This essay is a very belated response to a " part 1 " published in February 2015. The gist of that essay was a response to a corre...

Thursday, December 11, 2014

TOO ILLEGIT TO QUIT PT. 1

Before delving more into the question of "Bat-legitimacy," I want to lay down some background as to what ways, if any, characters relevant to the "superhero idiom" have or have not been perceived as legitimate art-forms.

What I'm printing in this section is a slightly rewritten response to a letter. Suffice to say, I wrote a piece for my apa talking about the fact that of all superheroic types, only Tarzan enjoyed long-running serial success as a cinematic hero. A correspondent pointed out that Tarzan wasn't perceived as an "A-list" character. What I wrote in response may not be entirely easy to follow without the correspondent's words, but some of the commentary does bear on the question of legitimacy in pop culture.

___________________________

Re: my remarks on Tarzan—I wasn’t
speaking of the studios’ attitude toward Tarzan, as to whether he was viewed as
“A-list” or lower, but merely that audiences in the Classic Hollywood era were
willing to accept him as a hero despite his lack of naturalistic
normality. It would be fair to regard
Tarzan as one of many well-made B-film serial franchises, including Sherlock
Holmes and Charlie Chan. Yet, while some series-franchises flirted with
metaphenomenal antagonists, the heroes themselves were ordinary if
exceptional-in-some-way human beings. Other attempts to feature extraordinary
protagonists in cheap feature films—the Shadow, Chandu the Magician—didn’t last
long for whatever reasons, and for twenty-something years the only consistent
cinematic source for “superheroes” was what I choose to call the “C-list”—that
is, the serials, firmly aimed at kids.
Only there did Hollywood choose to address the popularity of comic-book
superheroes, whether they were adapting comic-book characters or coming up with
their own versions, like “the Masked Marvel.”

But the American A-list actors only
rarely went near extraordinary protagonists, with the exception of Douglas
Fairbanks Sr,, who created one of the first in American cinema, the Thief of
Baghdad, and provided the first film-adaptation of Zorro, which alone probably kept that hero
from falling into obscurity along with other Johnson McCulley characters. John
Wayne, whom you mention, did in his early years perform in three serials, one of which, THE
HURRICANE EXPRESS, might qualify for meta-status, though of course Wayne wasn’t
an A-lister at the time. Once an actor moved into the A-list, he or she might
appear in any number of realistic adventure-stories, in the genres of westerns,
war, or mysteries—but not often science fiction or fantasy. Horror-films were
something of an exception: they offered such opportunities for barnstorming
performances that you could get an A-lister to do one, like Claude Rains in THE
INVISIBLE MAN or Charles Laughton in ISLAND OF LOST SOULS. But then, these were
also adaptations of novels that had some strong critical repute, which is more
than one could say for TARZAN OF THE APES or most other novels featuring
metaphenomenal heroes.

BTW, to
support the A-list distinction even more—in a TCM interview William Wellman
said that he was brought in to provide uncredited direction on a Tarzan picture-- specifically, TARZAN ESCAPES-- because the studio was
short-handed. He didn’t want to do it, but was surprised when he enjoyed the
experience. Supposedly he asked the studio heads to let him do another, and was
told, “Are you crazy? You’re an A-lister, bringing in the big money; we can’t
have you waste your talents on Tarzan!”